The Black Robe Morton, Guy Asian American,Canada,Fiction,Mystery

A detective novel set in Vancouver, British Columbia's Chinatown. The main character, Donegal Dawn, is a mysterious amateur detective and master of disguise called in by the police to solve particularly perplexing cases. Dawn is particularly adept at passing unnoticed in the Asian quarter of the city. His ethnic background is a mystery, according to the narrator, "the confusion of races submerged identity." The novel was filmed as The Secrets of Chinatown in 1935. The author spent his career as a journalist in Toronto who wrote crime novels on the side. This novel was published the same year in London as King of the World. First edition (first printing, with the same date on the copyright page and the title page). A very good copy in yellow-orange cloth-covered boards and a one-color dust jacket (printed in black, with halftones used for gray). The jacket, which preserves its $2.00 price on the flap, has small areas of loss at the edges and is otherwise very good. There are two old small labels on the rear endpaper.